What will the art team's role be in uninhabited planets? Will you guys essentially create planet texture sets and then the procedural stuff will kick in? Can we expect to see planetside environments that require special equipment just to pay it a visit (such as different atmospheres with different breathing suits, temperature protection, gravity protection, visibility differences, etc)?asked by Dr.BigMoney

Well, right now the art team is focusing on building out the inhabited locations. We will have uninhabited locations as well.Further in the future once the game is released, I know that we will be doing R&D on potentially procedurally generated planets so that we can expand the number of locations. We will still have to create art of that as well, even if it's procedurally generated. So... the answer is yes. We will be building art for all locations.

Are you sure about that? Is that your final answer?

I don't know how else we would see art... even if the programming... it's just not the way our game is built. So, I am pretty convinced that we will have artists building art even for procedurally generated planets.

Yes.So, the methodologies that we're using right now are split between 90/10 and then 10/90 and that means that the majority of the encounters that you'll have on an auto-generated planet will be auto-generated encounters. Versus the other side... you go to a planet like Terra and the experience is going to be very well crafted. So, it depends on which planet you go to... which system you're spending your time around and so on.Something that was also brought up in the question which is really interesting... the breathing apparatus, how is your ship impacted by planets with higher gravity... those conversations have been discussed and they're in the works. The details are to be determined.

I mean, one easy way that we could... for the examples you mentioned, how ships might be affected by different atmospheres and temperatures and things like that... because of the way we're building our damage system, we may be able to leverage that in order to apply effects to the ship based on the experience that the ship is getting. Right, so if you go through an especially hot environment and that's peeling off your paint or whatnot. We have the technology built in to leverage that in order to actually affect your ship in that way, so if you go to a crazy hot planet and then leave... now you may look scorched. The foundation for doing that exists.